Comic Books: Good For Kids? | Francoise Mouly | Big Think

Comic Books: Good For Kids?

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Could a medium once scorned as trash be a better teaching tool than the traditional picture book?

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Francoise Mouly:

Born in Paris, Françoise Mouly studied architecture at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, and moved to New York in 1974. She founded Raw Books & Graphics in 1977 and for fifteen years published artists’ monographs and the annual “Streets of Soho and Tribeca Map & Guide.” Ms. Mouly was the founder, publisher, designer, and co-editor, along with her husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, of the pioneering avant-garde comics anthology “RAW,” which launched in 1980.

Françoise Mouly joined The New Yorker as art editor in April 1993, and has been responsible for over 800 covers in the years since. In 2000, she published “Covering The New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers from a Literary Institution” (Abbeville Press). Also in 2000, Ms. Mouly launched a RAW Junior division, publishing books of comics for kids by star writers, children's book artists, and cartoonists. In the spring of 2008, Ms. Mouly launched TOON Books, her own imprint of hardcover comics for emerging readers.

In 2001, Ms. Mouly was named chevalier in the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. She and her husband live in Manhattan.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What can comic books do for young children that traditional picture books can’t?

Francoise Mouly: The reason I started to do comics for kids, the real reason is because it worked for me. When my children were young there is a point where they were in first grade and they were told by April you have to know how to read and it worked for my daughter, but with my son, I mean same environment, very bright kid. We had always read to him. Loved being read to, but the light bulb that goes on that makes him a fluent reader it just took much longer and since my husband was reading American literature… I always spoke French to my kids, so I was reading in French. We needed something that would sustain his interest and lo and behold it turns out that the culture I come from, French comics, has marvelous offerings for young kids, not just Tintin and Asterix, but Boule et Bill, just hundreds of really great kid’s comics, so every night it was a pleasure and the reason why a kid who loves being read to will pay attention to the comics better than he would to an illustrated text is that there is something for him or her to follow on the page. There is a visual flow. There is a visual narrative that is implicitly understandable even when you don’t understand the words and in a good comic, and they are hard to find, but good comics have parallel intertwined narratives. It’s not just picture, repetition in the words. There is a lot of information that is communicated visually and it’s a perfect point of entry. What we’ve been saying is that comics are a gateway into literature.

Recorded on January 26, 2010

Interviewed by Austin Allen